Surviving

by Henry Green

  Our instructors came from the same stable. We are here on earth only, if strong enough, to look life in the face. If some of the 3,000 LFB had curious ideas it was they who, when real trouble came with bombs, when fires such as they had never seen twitted the horizon, it was these men who sent us in, and often recalled us under conditions they felt were too dangerous, double-faced yet an extraordinary race of men. And then not just men, but perhaps even already heroes, some of them perhaps.

  In London the supply of pumps was a very close-run thing. By the time of Munich only 99 had been delivered against 3,000 ordered. By November 1938 with 13,500 AFS recruited only 145 appliances had been supplied. But by the middle of 1939 the pumps came along so fast that there was trouble in finding storage space.

  Anyone reading this might reasonably conclude that all was for the best in the worst of worlds. Threatened as never before the British, in their hundreds of thousands with all this equipment, were happily busy training to get ready for their finest hour.

  Training they were but the difficulty of being taught by an LFB man was that if you failed then he thought he would be blamed – after all he was paid for teaching you, wasn’t he? – and if you flunked he was sure he could lose his precious pension. So no one failed.

  This may seem inconceivable but it is true, and the fear of losing the pension, not available to AFS, must never be forgotten hereafter, whatever happened, let the blood flow where it may. On this point LFB men were hallucinated.

  It even went so far there was an AFS recruit had forgotten how to write and in his written examination Bernie, our chief instructor, wrote it all out in his own hand for him. No one failed, for that was an extravagance the LFB felt could not be afforded. The halt, the lame, the blind got in.

  So what then did we learn? How much the LFB hated us, certainly this was explained, almost apologetically, over and over again. How to put out fires? Hardly. Nothing? No, not that. We just all of us began to live another life in which we had an entirely different way of living.

  For instance when I had ‘passed out’, that is passed the examination no one was allowed to flunk, it was part of the contract that I should attend for two hours each week in case there was a real fire. All this of course before the war, in the sort of unreal peace which then existed. Thus one afternoon I came in to find the LFB returned from a basement job. They were not spick and span. In particular their eyes were bright red and they were crying without sobs. Their different world had been the thick hot smoke peculiar to basement fires. Later when things really began happening, we were to find that thick cold smoke was worst, cold but not dispersed, arising from an incident of perhaps the night before. This gripped by the throat. Until you could break a few windows you were throttled, but if you had a head cold it was miraculously cured. You lost so much mucus by the eyes and nose.

  The whole point of a fireman is that he is endlessly waiting. And most have lost their nerve. They wait for perhaps six months and then get into a fire at which they are thoroughly and completely frightened. They say stone stairs down to a basement are worst, worse than wood they will collapse with you and one such experience is sufficient. They say the water they use cools the stone which has expanded in the heat so that it shrinks out of the seating and comes down. Or they may have a nasty rescue forced upon them. Anything dangerous or ‘bad’ is automatically up to firemen. But however frightened, they are hardly ever cowards. Behind them they have the crew, the other men on the appliance. They are like a small pack of hounds, cowards alone they may be but when together ready to take on lions.

  Their being brought into action was governed in my day by the telephone. It is wireless now and may be television next. The huntsman who set them on, who said where to go until they could actually smell smoke, was called the watchroom attendant, a man who never went to fires himself.

  Not well paid, out of everything really, whose only other job was to record whatever happened over the long sad hours he waited, the day-long task to fill in his log book and the boredom was such that it was read at least twice a day by everyone else, the watchroom attendant on the rare occasion he did get a fire and the address given him straight by whoever it might be on the other end, the watchroom attendant did not immediately as might be expected pull the lever which ‘put the bells down’. He had larger fish to fry.

  He had to find out how many pumps, that is appliances, to send. Surrounded by a large card index system, he first looked up the address. The rateable value of what was on fire determined the attendance.

  There is no wicked capitalist trick in this, or is there? True that, pre-war, fire insurance companies contributed annually to the LFB, the remainder being paid out of rates. But the rateable value of a building was directly related to its size, or volume, in other words to how much it contributed to the rates. And the building’s cubic content of course had a bearing on the sort of bonfire it might make, bonfire, or conflagration ‘when well alight’ as they pompously term this. So then having determined the value of the structure he had been told was on fire he put the bells down and sent us off, one appliance, two, or three for a big building as his cards told him.

  Such a thing happened to me only once in peacetime. Sitting in the watchroom, ready dressed so as not to miss the pump, the attendant on what seemed an ordinary phone call murmured directly to me ‘Ready George’ and began to look through his card index. ‘Fire,’ I yelled to empty beating silence in my heart, and all but fainted. And then he put the bells down.

  Running like a hare on the ground floor, I was only just on the ladders as the LFB came swooping down their poles. And we were off, crash open doors, afternoon sudden sunlight after naked light bulbs, the steady heavy surge of this seven-ton vehicle which was a mass of hydraulics, and then above all the very much ting-a-ling bell, the LFB men dressed as we went along but I, ready already, had time to look around.

  Along what is called a main thoroughfare my hope was we might cause a stir. But no traffic parted, only one child on a pavement stopped at the end of his mother’s arm and pointed. That innocent could never have even guessed how much of a child one fireman he saw before him was swishing past.

  This call ended as a false alarm, the kind they call ‘malicious’, which means no one, nothing.

  Next time I went ‘on the bell’ was some eighteen months later, first night of the blitz. It was the opening night and coming back twelve hours later, we used the bell again. Black, wet through, dead exhausted, I almost fell off the pump when we got, to what could hardly be called, back home. It was then that a passer-by with a curiously guilty look which may have been and so probably was shyness, came up to announce softly only in my own ear, ‘Well, now you are a real fireman.’ If I’d had the strength left I would have hit him. Instead, like all who have just been in action, I just got my head down and slept for fifteen hours.

  The last few months of peace in Britain was to go back to be a little boy again, however old you were. It was so to speak those last few days of term, but no holidays promised, and the knowledge that having failed in everything, willy nilly next week would fix you a poorer, harsher academy in which all would indeed be different and for the worse.

  Working in an engineering office selling food-processing machinery, one found the younger men resigned to war, their war arranged for and chosen. The seniors, however, could not even entertain the possibility of fighting. Orders from customers were few and far between, ruin loomed a year or two on.

  Armament orders take a long time to seep through to smaller firms.

  We had all in the office said goodbye to that when, on September first, my red telegram came, and that meant mobilisation, it was like being back at school by the pool when the instructor to your regret at last said you can go solo, and ordered you ‘get wet, get in’. Alone.

  One civilian told my wife he this day went to his bank, cashed one hundred pounds into notes, and bought a bicycle for forty shillings. His idea was that all transport would cease. He wanted t
o be mobile.

  But the wardens’ main task had been preparing for the evacuation of children. On this day, shepherded by their school teachers, they began, they who quite often had never seen the countryside, in their thousands and thousands to go out in special trains to homes, and private homes at that, where people had said they would have them.

  A book could be made out of the stories about these children. There was one who saw apples growing on a tree and thought these were tied on. Others refused fresh peas, they would eat only out of the tin. From all accounts they were formidable and dauntless. Most were back by Christmas. But they had to get out again by next September.

  My wife was with our son at her parents’ in Herefordshire. I asked her last night (2–4–58) what she most remembered about this day. She considered and then she said, ‘I think the motor bikes. There were so many more.’ Everyone was on the move for sure, right enough.

  So I was alone in London that dreadful morning, forty-eight hours before war was declared, and dressed alone into the still unfamiliar uniform with prickly trousers, alone, frightened, sickened, sure of dying.

  UNLOVING

  (Published in The Times, 1961)

  If the writing of novels is for the author a way of clearing his bloodstream of the various poisons being pumped by his poor heart, then the reading of them may be the reverse of this process, or, more usually, a pleasant soporific as one gets older and one’s own heart begins to wither and fade.

  Of course in adolescence, cooped up in some boarding school, one is avid for any experience and reads everything that lies to hand. And experience is certainly what reading is. Not least in the personality of the man or woman who has written the book you are reading as for the characters they present. To one reader at least – to speak for myself – unless one or other of the characters runs away with the book, then it is the mind and the heart of the writer that matters, and instructs. And, if she who writes is a woman and one happens to be a man, how much more!

  The way the author expresses his cast, the way he or she puts it all together in say 70,000 words, the construction, the edifice give one an idea of him or her which could not be obtained in a fortnight’s tête à tête. People are such liars. But while novels lie, it is not hard to tell where they do so – why I do not know – where they are then, as reviewers say, ‘unconvincing’.

  This ability to spot the bogus or untrue is mysteriously granted to almost all educated readers, cannibal eccentrics (i.e., most reviewers excluded). Everyone, black, yellow or white, is writing novels now, and even if one has never visited their sundrenched beaches, after a page or two (and I am a one-novel-a-day man) one can inevitably tell. There are no barriers in narrative, except that of the religious novel to the irreligious. I have just been reading Charles Williams, who to me is meaningless, and I have great difficulty with Antonia White, Graham Greene and the later Evelyn Waugh. Yet some myths ring true, notably one or two novels by West Indians, and heaven knows what will come out of the new Africa in the form of what is called fiction.

  Because fiction, or indeed any book, if good, is not lying, it is a world, a life of its own. Marginal perhaps, but the marginal, or oblique, has great value. Who wants to travel in Arabia Deserta as Doughty did? At the same time it is one of the great classics of our age. Hemingway died just the other day. I saw in action two of the matadors, Belmonte and Lalanda, he so admired and have just enough Spanish to have read the reviews of their performances then, the day after watching and feeling the blood, sun and sand, everything stylised. The aficionados I knew in Spain did not think much of Death in the Afternoon but, if over-romanticised, all the same it was all right by me back home in this misty, steamy, almost Celtic island. Let Hemingway lie in peace, bless him. With almost every bone in his body already broken he drove his car, in the middle of the last war, at night, slap into a filled Fire Service water tank in Sloane Square. The policeman who got him out told me there was a quarter of an inch of blood on the floor. He came out of hospital in ten days. He was a man. Perhaps he should not have been a writer, but fought bulls or huge marlin in the Gulf of Mexico. In any case he makes any contemporary of mine thin blooded. Céline also is now dead, that incalculably fine writer.

  And yet there are those who watch and wait, who don’t particularly participate, who still merit a reward. True they see everyone, themselves included, getting worse in health. But death after all is a great deliverer. Good writers, if thin blooded, still live after they are dead.

  The observer, better than Hemingway, who can tell us, is the man who matters. Chekhov, for instance. When he saw moonlight reflected in jagged glass fixed by concrete on top of an estate wall of stone, he puts the whole thing down for ever in, I think, three lines. In his short story ‘The Kiss’ he does more than realise and understand, he makes life as the medicos cannot. Living one’s own life can be a great muddle, but the great writers do not make it plain, they palliate, and put the whole in a sort of proportion. Which helps; and on the whole, year after year, help is what one needs.

  All this means that writers cannot give the answer. Nor do the wolves in full cry after the troika help the wretched writer being chased to death against a ravening pack of very much younger critics. Or the older Sitwells for that matter, though I for one have never written a word for or against them, nor vice versa. But their response to any comment they dislike is now positively violent. We, that is the thin blooded, who have been in two wars, have not much left. We had starvation in the first and bombardment in the second. My generation regards with contempt what one can only describe as the social double meanings of Amis et al.

  Amis and Wain in their novels often put their young men to rise on the backs of women in the red-brick universities of which there are plenty of buildings in Cambridge as well as Reading. So why should one complain? I don’t know, except they are both really bad writers. Lucky Jim is disastrous because it pretends to make something pretentious out of nothing without a thought that (to quote a title of mine) the whole thing was nothing from the start.

  Of course it is no use finding complaint against one’s contemporaries, even C. P. Snow. We all put everything in words as best we know. But there is a winnowing, and perhaps Snow and also Philip Toynbee in their comments should now be silent for a while. Snow thinks and writes of power. Toynbee still seems to be in his impenetrable muddle. And yet in spite of them people are still writing. So what? Certainly nothing these two critics could agree on.

  Forget therefore the nattering in so-called high places. Remember also that novelists who read and review current work can usually only see how they would do it themselves. Believe that on the whole novelists who use English on both sides of the Atlantic are writing to a higher general standard than ever before. It is the novelist’s reviewers who are the curse every Sunday in this island. If nothing were published or written where would they be? What they say should be taken with a great tongue in the cheek. As a rule they have had a success with a novel of their own, good luck to them, and where are they then but in the sweaty grasp of the Inspector of Taxes? So all they can do is to churn out ambiguous reviews for cash. We have, in literature, as reviewed in the press, no standards left. Anyone who joins in now will find himself a flea in the hair of the dog, which is gnawing ignominiously and futilely at its bottom where the tail joins the trunk.

  FOR JENNY WITH AFFECTION FROM HENRY GREEN

  (Published in The Spectator, 1963)

  ⎯

  Jenny Rees was the daughter of Goronwy Rees, a long-standing friend of Green’s. It was to Jenny that Green dictated parts of an intended autobiography, ‘Pack My Bag Repacked’. This project, his last, was abandoned.

  ⎯

  Green lives with his wife in Belgravia. He has now become a hermit. Only the other day a woman of sixty looking after the tobacconist’s shop was dragged by her hair across the counter and stabbed twice in the neck. That is one reason why I don’t go out any more.

  Green can write novels, but h
is present difficulty is to know quite how to do it. As Time magazine says, Green is ailing, which means he has several things wrong with him which, rising sixty, is perhaps to be expected.

  Of course, he sees his contemporaries die almost every day, like John Strachey and many another.

  Whether you are a man like Kingsley Martin and believe in things is, of course, an advantage. Green tells me he doesn’t believe in anything at all. And perhaps that is not a bad thing. Love your wife, love your cat and stay perfectly quiet, if possible not to leave the house. Because on the street if you are sixty danger threatens.

  It has always been said as a sign of age that if you don’t see policemen with medal ribbons it means that you are getting very old. In other words, the policemen are very much younger. One of the reasons I won’t go out is for fear of meeting a policeman. Yesterday I saw four at the corner and was very frightened indeed.

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who was one of the best novelists who has ever lived, and is dead now, had such a persecution thing. When Auric, the composer, was walking with him in a fog in Paris there was somebody wavering in front of them and Céline said in a very loud voice, ‘C’est un juif.’ Auric was much disturbed because he didn’t have a thing about Jews and in any case the fog was too deep to tell.

  So the whole thing is really not to go out. If one can afford it, the best thing is to stay in one place, which might be bed. Not sex, for sleep.